Carrhae (85 page)

Aruna’s eyes flicked right and left in a desperate search for solace but there was none. She tried to lift herself up but her efforts were feeble as more and more of her lifeblood seeped from her body onto the floor. Spartacus stood up and took a last look at the dying woman who had once been the high queen of the Parthian Empire, before turning and leaving the room, calling his dog after him as he descended the stairs and walked outside.

His men had conducted a thorough search of the villa and all the outbuildings to ensure no one was left alive, the archers still covering the entrance of the barracks with their bows.

‘Burn them out,’ ordered Spartacus to the commander of his Agraci.

The archers shot arrows at the shutters that barred the windows and the door while the warriors collected dry wood from storerooms and hay from the stables and loaded them on two carts that were then doused with oil and set alight, before pushing them against the building. Within minutes the carts were ablaze and the flames were lapping round the building. As the fire took hold of the carts the legionaries inside the barracks charged from the building, preferring to take their chances against men rather than being roasted alive.

Two were immediately felled by arrows but the rest, armed with swords and holding shields in front of their bodies, charged at the Agraci warriors who faced them in a semi-circle. Coughing, their eyes smarting, the Romans fought bravely, jabbing the points of their short swords at the fleeting shapes of the warriors they faced. But they did not see the archers who had retreated a few paces and who now searched out targets illuminated against the blazing building. The Agraci teased and taunted the legionaries as the archers picked them off one by one, the last one being killed as he fell to the ground with an arrow in his thigh and the side of his head caved in by a series of sword blows.

‘Time to go,’ shouted Spartacus, alarmed that the flames might be seen from afar.

They ran out of the compound back to the trees where they collected their horses and rode back to the villa of Andromachus. The next day Spartacus and his party departed and headed southeast into the desert, away from Syria and towards Palmyra. Once there Spartacus would ride back to Dura to prepare for the great expedition into Syria that was being prepared by his uncle.

Chapter 21

Two years after the Battle of Carrhae I led forty thousand horsemen into Syria to satisfy Orodes’ requests. I took Dura’s horse archers, all my lords, seventeen thousand of their men and riders from Hatra, Babylon and Mesene on a great raid that achieved absolutely nothing. The Roman survivors of Carrhae shut themselves in Antioch and we burned and looted many Syrian villages and small towns whose inhabitants had mostly fled before us. Several times the Romans ventured forth from their strongholds and slaughtered small parties of our horsemen but when we pursued them they invariably retreated behind their stonewalls. I eventually ordered a general retreat back to Parthia and never set foot in Syria again.

I thought the whole affair folly as it showed the Romans that Parthian horsemen were not invincible but Orodes was delighted, believing that the Romans would not provoke Parthia again. I had my doubts but for a while both the eastern and western frontiers of the empire were secure and at peace.

Orodes should have enjoyed a long and prosperous reign but the gods had decided otherwise for the birth of his son had been accompanied by tragedy. Three days after she had given birth to the boy they named Phraates in honour of Orodes’ father, Axsen had died.

Orodes had visibly aged before our eyes as grief gripped him with a cruel intensity. He gradually handed over much of his power to courtiers who had too much authority and like all small-minded and mediocre men coveted influence and wealth. Whether Orodes resented the son whose birth had robbed him of his wife I did not know, but the boy grew up in a Ctesiphon once again poisoned by intrigue and ambition and came to despise his father. Pale and thin, Phraates hid his emotions and presented a mask of aloofness and coldness to the world.

As time passed Orodes shut himself off from the world, shunning his old friends as sorrow consumed him while his son’s resentment against his father grew. When he reached his sixteenth birthday Phraates had him murdered before declaring himself king of kings. Shock reverberated throughout Parthia to be quickly replaced by outrage that a good and just ruler had been murdered, but the advisers of Phraates were clever and knew that there was no enthusiasm for a civil war to topple the young high king. Letters were sent from Ctesiphon to the various capitals in the empire demanding allegiance to Phraates and it seemed as though Mithridates had returned to the world. Perhaps he had, the gods having sent back his rotten soul in the body of his nephew.

I ignored his demands for allegiance and requests for troops when, a year later, that young man whose company I had found so entertaining years ago in Syria invaded Parthia with an army of one hundred thousand men. Mark Antony decided not to march through Hatran territory but instead crossed the Euphrates at Zeugma and advanced north into Armenia where he found a warm reception from the treacherous Artavasdes, who offered support to his campaign. And so Mark Antony marched his army into northern Parthia together with thirteen thousand Armenian troops. But he lost his supplies, Artavasdes deserted him and Spartacus, now a king, destroyed his rearguard of ten thousand men. Antony was forced to retreat back to Zeugma, all the while being harried by swarms of Parthian horsemen. He lost a further thirty thousand men during this withdrawal before limping back into Syria where an Egyptian queen named Cleopatra joined him with money and clothes for his exhausted army. I heard that they were lovers and desired to rule the world, but ended up taking their own lives during a great Roman civil war in which a young man by the name of Augustus emerged victorious.

An end to all things

They are gone, all of them. Every Companion who had accompanied me from Italy was now dead, the only record of their existence being the names carved on the stone memorial in the Citadel. I am old now, a relic of a bygone age, a frail old man whose time has passed.

The Romans did not return to Parthia though they made many threats to do so. Phraates continued to rule the empire as high king but unlike Mithridates learned not to unnecessarily provoke the other kings of the empire. I never forgave him for the murder of his father, my friend. But he was always polite and deferential to me and I had neither the energy nor inclination to instigate a revolt against his rule, which in truth was no more tyrannical than other high kings. Phraates may have been ruthlessly cunning but he was also clever. He insisted on regular meetings of the Council of Kings at Esfahan, which I found personally tedious but were a useful venue where the rulers of the empire could vent their frustrations and get the ear of the high king. Phraates did what he wanted and ignored anything he disagreed with but gave the illusion that he was a benevolent high king who listened to his fellow rulers. After a while I stopped going to these bi-annual gatherings, giving as an excuse the pain in my leg.

It was not wholly untrue because as the years passed my leg became more and more troublesome and I was forced to rest it for days at a time. I had scars on my left arm, on my back and on my face but the arrow that had pierced my leg outside the walls of Dura had the most debilitating effect. It was during one such recuperative period, when I was sitting on the palace terrace with my feet up, that Strabo searched me out, a distraught look on his face that told me something was wrong.

‘Remus is down.’

I hobbled to the stables to find my old stallion lying in his stall, his head lifting as he heard my voice.

‘He can’t get up,’ said Strabo with a tremulous voice.

‘What is the matter with him?’ I whispered, already knowing the answer.

‘Old age, majesty, nothing more, nothing less. Years of campaigning takes its toll on even the strongest stallion.’

I entered the stall and eased myself down to sit by him, gently stroking his neck. After the great raid into Syria I had no longer ridden Remus on long journeys and he had thrived in his semi-retirement. Tegha became my main warhorse. I still rode Remus, of course, taking him out every morning for a ride when I was at Dura, but as the time passed he developed stiffness in his joints. His stride became shorter, his movements slower and his flexibility much reduced. And now he had suddenly deteriorated rapidly.

As I talked to him and continued to stroke him he stopped trying to rise and seemed content to be in my company, snorting quietly and rolling his eye to look at me.

Gallia and my children came soon after, stroking his neck and kissing him on the head before leaving him for what they knew was the last time. I stayed with him all that day and night, talking to him about the great victories he had taken part in and the thousands of miles we had travelled together. His breathing was calm and untroubled as the first rays of the dawn sun crept into his stall the next morning and he looked up at me one last time and then those big blue eyes closed and he exhaled. I held his head in my arms as his mighty heart stopped and tears ran down my face onto his white coat. The stall was illuminated by a bright yellow glow as Shamash embraced the soul of a mighty warhorse and carried it to heaven where he would wait until my time on earth was over.

I had seen death many times on the battlefield, witnessed the terrible injuries that arrows, lances and blades can inflict on flesh and bone, seen bellies ripped open and tasted the nauseating stench of blood and gore in my mouth, but the death of Remus affected me greatly. He had been my loyal companion for over thirty years and now he had been taken from me. It was a great loss but I realise now that life is about loss: the loss of parents, the loss of friends and, most of all, the loss of one’s youth.

As the years passed I withdrew more and more from the affairs of the empire. Isabella came of age and married the son of King Peroz of Sakastan, who was a frequent visitor to Dura and brought his boy, a fine young man who had inherited the good looks of his mother. And so my second daughter left us and made her home at the other end of the empire. Shorty afterwards we also lost Eszter but her passing was a time of great sadness and privation and was accompanied by the death of Dura’s queen.

A great pestilence came from China and swept through the empire like an army of demons from the underworld, striking down rich and poor alike. The epidemic decimated towns and cities and Dura was no exception. We heard of its approach and tried to take measures to prevent it reaching us, dismantling the pontoon bridges near the city and placing guards on the stone bridge further north to prevent trade caravans transiting through the kingdom. In this way we hoped to prevent anyone carrying the illness from entering Dura, but then word reached us that people in Palmyra were dying of the contagion and that it had entered Syria and Judea. And then, one morning as I sat in the throne room listening to Alcaeus reporting on how the bodies of those who had died of the disease were being disposed of, Gallia fell ill. Within hours she was confined to her bed as she was afflicted by a burning sensation in her head.

Alcaeus, ignoring the danger to his own health, attended her and administered medicines while Claudia spread charms around our bedroom and recanted spells to save her mother. I knew that it was all in vain as my wife’s eyes became swollen and red and her voice hoarse. Coughing fits wracked her body and vomiting fits weakened her. I stayed with her day and night, wiping the sweat from her body as a burning fever coursed through her. The servants, those who still lived, were frightened by her appearance as her beautiful blonde hair fell out and the smell of death filled our bedroom. On the fifth day after she had fallen ill Gallia died as I cradled her in my arms. A week later Eszter also succumbed to the plague.

By the time the pestilence had passed it had claimed a third of Dura’s citizens and hundreds of the army’s soldiers. The city and trade slowly recovered but the army never did. I was still king but handed over the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom to Claudia, who had declared that she would marry no man and rejected the advances of a stream of suitors who made their way to the city, all intent on becoming the husband of the daughter of Pacorus of Dura. All their efforts were in vain and as the years passed they stopped coming and the sharp-tongued Claudia became Dura’s ruler. She surrounded herself with mystics and sorcerers and gradually the army was reduced in size. The legionary camp was abandoned as the Durans and Exiles became mere shadows of their formers selves and eventually became nothing more than a city garrison. It was a sad end for two such prestigious fighting units but the regions around the kingdom were at peace and I was too old to lead them now. The cataphracts were similarly reduced to half their former strength and the horse archers numbered barely a dragon. They garrisoned the forts that dotted the kingdom but were more a force for maintaining order than fighting wars.

Not that there were any wars to fight because, despite Phraates’ scheming and cruel nature, even he recognised that the empire would be best served by peaceful relations with its neighbours as opposed to eternal conflict. The young man who had defeated Mark Antony and his Egyptian queen became emperor of the whole Roman Empire. He was called Caesar Augustus. He promised peace in return for the eagles that we had captured at Carrhae being sent back to Rome.

In a surprising act of courtesy I received a letter from Phraates asking whether I would be amenable for the trophies to be surrendered to the Romans. After the battle they had been distributed among the great temples of the empire – at Hatra, Uruk, Babylon, Seleucia, Esfahan and Susa – so he could have ordered them to be sent to him at Ctesiphon without consulting me. I replied that I had no objection but reminded him that one of the eagles resided in Palmyra, having been given to Haytham by Spartacus. Haytham had died many years before, ironically peacefully in his tent, and his son, Malik, had also passed away. A cold, cunning individual named Fatih, meaning ‘conqueror’, who was actually not unlike Parthia’s high king in character, though I neglected to mention that in my reply, now ruled the Agraci. But I did write that he was unlikely to surrender the eagle that the Agraci possessed. However, I had underestimated Phraates because he sent a courier back to Dura stating that he realised the Agraci had one of the eagles but this could be compensated for if I was willing to agree to the Romans being given the eagle that I had taken nearly fifty years ago and which resided in the Great Temple at Hatra.